Drake waves vocal rider
However, the specific claim about an absence of animal entrainment (as contrasted to more complex musical abilities) has been based on very little empirical evidence. The assumption traces at least as far back as Wallin et al., and appears to have emerged from an attempt to encapsulate the difference between humans’ rich musical capabilities and other animals’ lack thereof. As we will review in a later section, positive evidence is accruing for entrainment in certain species, but here we challenge the overall assumption that these cases are rare and that a few examples contrast against a background of lack of entrainment in the animal kingdom. The extent of entrainment in the animal kingdom potentially has widespread implications, not only for understanding the roots of human dance, but also for understanding the neural and cognitive architectures of animals.Īlthough there was early interest in the possibility of animal entrainment (Craig, 1916, 1917 Wheeler’s, 1917, remarks on antelopes and pelicans), the more recent literature on this topic has generally accepted it as established that most animals do not entrain (Bispham, 2006 Fitch, 2012 Greenfield, 1994 Hoeschele et al., 2015 Merchant & Honing, 2014 Merker, Madison, & Eckerdal, 2009 Patel, 2006 Patel et al., 2009a, b Schachner et al., 2009 Trainor et al., 2009 Wallin et al., 2000, p. Among the factors that affect whether an animal will entrain are sufficient control over the motor behavior to be entrained, sufficient perceptual sophistication to extract the entraining beat from the overall sensory environment, and the current cognitive state of the animal, including attention and motivation. We propose that when entrainment is not driven by fixed, mandatory connections between input and output (as in the case of, e.g., fireflies entraining to each others’ flashes), it depends on voluntary control over, and voluntary or learned coupling of, sensory and motor systems, which can paradoxically lead to apparent failures of entrainment. The question then becomes, not why a few privileged species are able to beat-match, but why species do not always do so-why they vary in both spontaneous and learned beat-matching.
Furthermore, mutual entrainment of oscillations is a general principle of physical systems, both biological and nonbiological, suggesting that entrainment of motor systems by sensory systems may be a default rather than an oddity. Instead, such evidence as there is suggests that this capacity could be quite widespread. Here we reassess the arguments and evidence for an absence of beat-matching in animals, and conclude that in fact no convincing case against beat-matching in animals has been made. This throws open the question of how widespread beat-matching ability is in the animal kingdom. This assumption has been undercut by findings of beat-matching in various species of parrots and, more recently, in a sea lion, several species of primates, and possibly horses.
Until recently, the literature on rhythmic ability took for granted that only humans are able to synchronize body movements to an external beat-to entrain.